02609cam a22002657 4500001000700000003000500007005001700012008004100029100002100070245013100091260006600222490004200288500001500330520149400345530006101839538007201900538003601972690005802008690006302066700002002129710004202149830007702191856003802268856003702306w19225NBER20170818013326.0170818s2013 mau||||fs|||| 000 0 eng d1 aFletcher, Jason.10aReligion and Risky Health Behaviors among U.S. Adolescents and Adultsh[electronic resource] /cJason Fletcher, Sanjeev Kumar. aCambridge, Mass.bNational Bureau of Economic Researchc2013.1 aNBER working paper seriesvno. w19225 aJuly 2013.3 aRecent studies analyzing the effects of religion on various economic, social, health and political outcomes have been largely associational. Although some attempts have been made to establish causation using instrument variable (IV) or difference-in-difference (DID) methods, the instruments and the spatial and temporal variations used in these studies suffer from the usual issues that threaten the use of these identification techniques--validity of exclusion restrictions, quality of counterfactuals in the presence of spatial assortative sorting of people, and concern about omitted variable bias in the absence of information on family level unobservables and child-specific investment by families. During the adolescent years, religious participation might be a matter of limited choice for many individuals, as it is often heavily reliant on parents and family background more generally. Moreover, the focus of most of the studies has been on religious rites and rituals i.e., religious participation or on the intensity of participation. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this paper analyzes the effects of a broad set of measures of religiosity on substance use at different stages of the life course. In contrast to previous studies, we find positive effects of religion on reducing all addictive substance use during adolescence, but not in a consistent fashion during the later years for any other illicit drugs except for crystal meth and marijuana. aHardcopy version available to institutional subscribers. aSystem requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files. aMode of access: World Wide Web. 7aZ12 - Religion2Journal of Economic Literature class. 7aZ18 - Public Policy2Journal of Economic Literature class.1 aKumar, Sanjeev.2 aNational Bureau of Economic Research. 0aWorking Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research)vno. w19225.4 uhttp://www.nber.org/papers/w1922541uhttp://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w19225